Peter Drew's AUSSIES Posters Turn Pyrmont Wharf Into A Daily Identity Walk
A free outdoor Peter Drew exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum is asking Sydney visitors to look again at the people behind Australia's migration history.
AUSSIES Peter Drew exhibition artwork outside the Australian National Maritime Museum.
A free outdoor Peter Drew exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum is giving Sydney visitors a daily, public-facing way to revisit Australia's migration history.
AUSSIES Peter Drew is listed as running every day, all day, from Friday 28 August to Thursday 31 December. The exhibition is located outside Wharf 7, near the Pyrmont ferry stop, making it a harbour-side stop rather than a ticketed gallery-only experience.
The City of Sydney listing frames the exhibition around a direct question: what does an Aussie look like? Since 2016, artist Peter Drew has pasted thousands of AUSSIE posters across Australian streets. The portraits draw on a period when successive Commonwealth governments discriminated against non-white migration to Australia.
The historical frame is the White Australia policy, introduced in 1901, watered down after the Second World War and abolished in 1973. The listing says many of the people in Drew's work were seeking exemption from the dictation test, a mechanism that allowed officials to restrict migration by requiring would-be migrants to pass a test in a prescribed language.
For Pyrmont visitors, the exhibition turns a commuter and museum frontage into a civic prompt. It is free, outdoors and available daily, which makes it easy to encounter while moving between Darling Harbour, the ferry stop and the museum precinct.
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